“Do that, please. And perhaps it won’t happen again, eh?”
“Perhaps not. I certainly hope not. We all hope not.”
Heykus watched him leave, nodding a parting gesture—this was a good man, a valued employee—and then ran the fiz-status report; everything normal there. As he would have expected.
He began double-checking then. Making sure that all the steps in the program that would suppress this story completely had been implemented. It was worth taking the trouble, worth being scrupulous. The idea of other women reading about this was not acceptable. There had never been any leaks on these episodes, not one, in his entire career. And there were not ever going to be any. And there were not going to be any more episodes like the activities of those two Chaleuvre women in France . . . he was going to make some calls that would guarantee that. Such females should be given expert help immediately, at the first signs of their illness, not allowed to wander around in public with their pathetic condition on view to all the world. Whatever was wrong in France that accounted for their slipshod handling of the Chaleuvre case would have to be rooted out and set right; he intended to see to that personally.
II
“Reverend Pinter?”
The preacher already had his raincape over his arm and his hat in his hand, and was reaching out to palm the latch; he was leaving, and not lingering about it. But he stopped readily enough, and smiled at Jo-Bethany.
“Yes, Mrs. Chornyak,” he said politely. “Did you want something?”
She didn’t bother explaining about her name. Every woman in the place was addressed by outsiders as either Miss or Mrs. Chornyak, apparently on the basis of age alone. The linguist women let it pass, and she intended to do the same.
“There’s something I’m uneasy about, Reverend,” she told him. “I wonder if I could have a few minutes of your time to discuss a small problem.”
“A spiritual problem, my dear?”
“Yes . . . if you can spare the time. I know you’re busy, and you must be tired—it’s awfully late—but I’m uncomfortable about this.”
She could see the reluctance in his eyes; no doubt he had to listen to amazing amounts of gush and nonsense from women involved in “spiritual” problems. But he looked at her as a man looks who knows his duty and does it, and when he spoke he spoke kindly enough.
“I always have time to tend the sheep,” he said. “And of course I have time to speak to you. It’s a matter of some urgency to you, I take it.”
“I wouldn’t bother you if it weren’t, Reverend Pinter,” she said, feeling absurd, wishing there were someone else a woman could speak to in a situation like this. If only there could have been women who were preachers, she thought fretfully, knowing it was a scandalous idea and not caring. It was degrading, having to appeal to him to grant her an audience. It was like going to a doctor—degrading, and disgusting. You did not do it unless it was urgent.
Reverend Pinter was looking around him at the room of quiet women, seated at their various tasks, and Jo-Bethany knew what he was thinking. A spiritual problem—that meant privacy. She was going to have to clarify her status after all.
“Reverend,” she said hastily, “I’m the resident nurse here. A member of the staff. If I may walk with you to your flyer, no one will have any objection. They’ll assume that I have a health question of some kind to discuss with you.”
His face changed, and his smile became less false; he looked at her as if they were not meeting for the first time, as if they shared some secret, and said, “You’re not a Chornyak, then? Not a member of the Lines?”
“No, Reverend. I’m not a linguist. I live here because I work here.”
“I see.” The smile was warm now, and the eyes were smiling, too, and she understood—he was glad to learn that he was no longer slumming. “In that case, of course. By all means, walk to the curb with me and let’s see if I can be of help to you. It’s not Mrs. Chornyak, then.”
“No, Reverend Pinter. It’s Miss. Miss Schrafft. I am Jo-Bethany Schrafft.”
“Jo-Bethany . . . a charming old name, my dear.”
“It was my grandmother’s name.”
He bowed slightly as he opened the door for her, and waited while she stepped outside into the darkness, saying, “I do apologize, Miss Schrafft.”
“That’s all right,” she said, reminding herself that the question she had was one he’d know the answer for, whether he was in fact a godly man or not; it was a technical question. “You couldn’t have known.”
“No, I couldn’t, could I?” He laughed softly. “It’s not as if they were all green, or all purple, or all spotted—you can’t tell.”
Jo-Bethany made a polite vague sound of assent, and looked around to be sure no one was close enough to hear them . . . no, they had the lawn to themselves. He moved straight along the walk toward the curb, where a sedate dark flyer with a narrow white clerical stripe on its door was parked, and she walked at his side, hurrying a little to keep up.
“You say you’re uneasy, Miss Schrafft. Oops . . . watch out for the lilies, or whatever those are! What is the source of this uneasiness, exactly?”
“It’s these Thursday night services.”
“Like the one tonight?’
“Yes. This is . . . perhaps the fifth one I’ve gone to.”
“And you’re uneasy? Why? Regular worship should be encouraged, Miss Schrafft, no matter where it takes place. I’m more than happy to come here and preach when I’m called on to do so—I certainly don’t feel uneasy about it.”
“Reverend Pinter, it’s not the regular service that troubles me. It’s the rest of it. The other things.”
“Other things?” He stopped his brisk trek down the long walk and turned to look at her, his eyes twinkling. “What other things, my dear? Do they really sacrifice babies?”
Her shock made her gasp, and she wasn’t sorry; she had no desire to hide it. The man apologized immediately, and assured her that it was a very old joke, by which he meant no harm whatsoever. “The sort of joke one makes among men, my dear,” he added. “Not at all suitable for a woman’s ears. It’s been a very long day, and you’re correct that I’m tired—please forgive me.”
They were at the curb, then, and he opened the flyer door to set his cape and hat and Bible down on the passenger seat, while Jo-Bethany waited silently. He closed the door, turned toward her, leaned against the flyer’s gleaming side, and rubbed his hands vigorously together.
“There!” he said. “Now, you have my full attention, and I promise not to tell any more bad jokes. Please tell me what the ‘other things’ that concern you so are.”
Jo-Bethany keep her eyes on the grass at her feet; she didn’t like this man, and she wished she hadn’t started this. “You know we don’t usually have a preacher,” she began. “The women tell me that once a month is all the budget will stretch to.”
The Reverend snorted, making it clear what he thought of that, but he didn’t interrupt her, and she went on.
“At all the other services, it’s just the women, alone. With one of the older ones leading the service.”
The silence went suddenly thick, almost syrupy; she had to look up at him to find out why, and she saw that his face was stern and his eyes were narrowed.
“Miss Schrafft.” It was the voice of authority now. “Are those women preaching? If they are, you’re quite right to tell me, and I’ll go to the Head at once and have it stopped.”
“Oh, no!” Jo-Bethany shook her head, flustered, glad he hadn’t been able to read her mind when she was longing for a woman to discuss this with. “No, they’re just reading aloud from the Bible, and leading the singing. Of course, they’re not preaching!”
He shrugged his big shoulders and admonished her. “They do go out to work at government negotiations, you know—men’s work, Miss Schrafft. They interpret, and they translate. Their judgment is sought. Most improper. And one thing leads to another. If there were any group of women in this wor
ld sufficiently . . . mmm . . . ill-behaved to try their hand at preaching, it would be the women of the Lines.”
“They don’t preach, Reverend Pinter,” she said wearily. “I’m sure no such idea ever crossed their minds. They’re good, decent women.”
“‘Well, then, my dear—what is the problem?”
“Reverend, what worries me is the language that they use sometimes. I don’t know about it. I don’t know if it’s right.” There. She’d said it. If he thought she was foolish, so be it.
He frowned at her, obviously thinking hard, and then his face cleared and the snap of his fingers was so loud in the darkness that she jumped. “Aha!” he said. “Like the language they were using just as I came in this evening? Is that what you’re getting yourself all upset over?”
Silently, Jo-Bethany cursed Panglish. What she had had to say had been simple. A simple moral question. And it was taking forever, and she couldn’t find the right words, and she was keeping him standing here while she struggled to find some way to explain; and now he was of course treating her like a child. She wished she had never brought it up at all. Damn language, anyway!
“It is the shepherd’s charge to know everything there is to know about his sheep, my dear,” he was saying. “And I do know about the language these silly women use. What I don’t know is why it worries you.”
“It’s very strange,” she told him, stubbornly. Doggedly. “It’s not Greek. It’s not Latin. It’s certainly not anything American.”
“My dear child, what a very scrupulous conscience you have!”
“Yes. I do.” And I intend to go on having one, she thought, even if you are laughing at me.
“Miss Schrafft, it’s only their ‘Langlish’; sometimes they call it ‘Lahadan,’ something like that. There’s absolutely no harm in it. It’s a language these women made up as a kind of hobby—after all, they’re linguists! If they were farm women they might have houseplants, or pets; since they spend all their lives working with incomprehensible languages, they made up another one of those. The men of the Lines have always approved. I understand it’s called ‘The Encoding Project,’ and the women actually have a kind of mass get-together once a year, to fool with it. An excuse for a holiday for them, poor things! It’s a harmless pastime.”
“But to use it for worship? Is that all right? I mean—”
The preacher laughed heartily, from the belly, and she stepped back, sure he was going to reach over and chuck her under the chin. “All they do, dear, is translate parts of the King James Bible into the stuff. There’s no harm in that. It’s not as if they were writing things on their own. There’s no difference that I can see between saying the Lord’s Prayer from the good old King James in French or in Chinese or saying it in ‘Langlish.’ After all, dear child—our Savior didn’t say it in Standard American Panglish, either.”
Jo-Bethany had never thought of that before; it was almost shocking. But it was true, of course it was; Jesus had said the Lord’s Prayer in some other language. Greek? Egyptian? She had no idea. But not Panglish!
“Oh, my,” she said, almost whispering. “I’m afraid I’ve been ridiculous, Reverend Pinter. I’ve wasted your time.”
“Not at all, Miss Schrafft! Not at all!”
He went around to the driver’s side of the flyer as he spoke, letting her know that he did feel it was time he left, and opened the door, holding its edge as he talked. “You seem to be a very sensible woman, Miss Schrafft, and I’m going to share a confidence with you. The first time I ever heard them jabbering that stuff, just as I came in for a service, I thought I was hearing voodoo, or some such thing. I don’t mind telling you—although I’ll ask you not to let it go any farther—I went straight to Jonathan Asher Chornyak and I demanded a full explanation. I reacted very much as you’ve reacted, my dear, and I don’t think either of us was being ridiculous. But it was explained to me, as I’ve just explained it to you; the women have as a hobby the translating of Bible passages into this invented language they amuse themselves with. It must be like having a secret code, when you’re a kid, don’t you see. The men keep an eye on it, and are more than willing to humor them—as they pointed out to me, the women might well have taken up translating trashy love stories, or worse. Translating the Bible is actually a rather wholesome hobby, as hobbies go. And if they want to show off a bit and read their little translations aloud in their own home worship services . . . well. It’s childish, of course, and womanish, but it’s certainly innocent. My dear, please set your mind at rest and don’t fret about it any more.”
He took no chances that she wouldn’t be satisfied with that; he stepped into the flyer and closed the door firmly behind him, leaving her with a few parting words about being careful not to become more intimate with the linguist women than was necessary, and keeping her distance and simply carrying out her duties, and how hard it was to walk the line sometimes, and then he was gone.
Jo-Bethany was satisfied. He was a poor excuse for a man of God, but he had known the answer to her question. A technical question; a technical answer. It was a relief to her, knowing she needn’t worry about the language mixed into the services; now that she could be sure nothing about it conflicted with the practices of the United Reformed Baptist Church she was willing to admit to herself that she loved the sound of it. It soothed her, somehow. Rested her. She was glad she could relax and enjoy it, the way she enjoyed the singing.
She went back into the house, stopping on her way to touch the soft folded tops of the daylilies that bordered the walk. They were glorious in the daytime, every color of gold and yellow, many of them spotted and flecked.
“The men hate them,” Belle-Anne had told her. “They say they stink, and they call them weeds, and they’re always suggesting that we pull them up and put in a nice pink rosebush.”
“And will you?” Jo-Bethany had asked. “Rosebushes are so pretty.”
Belle-Anne laughed. “Just so,” she said. “Pretty, and sweet. But not glorious the way the daylilies are. Every little rose, just like every other little rose. And it’s so funny—the women used to beg for rosebushes, and the men wouldn’t let us have them. We got those huge beds of crazy lilies because they were weeds, and we could get them without spending money, and then they just spread and spread all for free. Now the men are sorry they didn’t let us have the roses, and we’ve come to love the lilies.”
“You won’t pull them up, then?”
“Not in a million years.”
“What if the men just go ahead and do it?”
“I don’t think they would,” said Belle-Anne seriously. “It would be very rude of them, and they have no reason to be rude. But if they did, it wouldn’t matter. The lilies would come back, you perceive. They’re like any weed—they’re not easy to get rid of. And then we’d have both roses and lilies.”
“No problem?”
“None at all.”
CHAPTER 7
“There once was a linguist most eerie,
whose papers made everyone weary;
but when we called them twaddle
he roared, “It’s a MODEL!
I never once called it a theory!”
(from Cautionary Limericks for the Downtrodden, annual publication of the graduate students of the Department of Language Sciences of California Multiversity)
Jonathan Asher Chornyak was deeply curious this morning; he’d been curious ever since the request for this appointment had appeared on his comscreen four days ago. What in the world did a college professor, with an international reputation already assured and an interplanetary one probable, want with the Head of the Lines? There hadn’t been a college professor under the roof of Chornyak Household in Jonathan’s lifetime, he was quite sure; he doubted there’d been one here in this century.
Because although the formal split between the Lines and the academic world had involved only Departments of Linguistics, it had spread—slowly, but inexorably—to include not just closely related fields like p
sychology and anthropology but the entire academic community. Other professors were fully capable of imagining what it was like for their colleagues in linguistics to have the youngsters from the linguist families in their classrooms. With every single one of those kids having native fluency in three human languages, including American Sign Language, plus one Alien language, plus a respectable fluency in perhaps another half dozen languages of Earth, plus PanSig! The young of the Lines had not only been far ahead of their fellow students; they’d been well ahead of their professors as well. The problem was not that they were multilingual; linguistics profs would have enjoyed having multilingual students who were naive about linguistics itself. The problem was that they were experts in what the professors were expected to teach them.
In the same way that a child from one of the great circus families like the Canestrellis would quite naturally know how to walk a tightrope and do a backflip, children of the Lines as young as nine or ten knew how to do formal linguistic analysis. It was natural; the adults around them were constantly involved in such analyses. But that made it no less a source of frustration for the profs. It made no difference whether you taught linguistics or the tuba—you could imagine what it would be like, and shudder at the prospect; and you could understand why an absolute split, with associated fervent hatred, had been inevitable.
And now here was a supernova college professor, not only seeking an appointment with a filthy Lingoe but requesting it inside a filthy Lingoe den! Normal procedure would have been to try to summon the filthy Lingoe to the campus, and to be outraged if he wasn’t grateful for the privilege. Jonathan was fascinated.
When he saw the man come through his door he became even more curious, because there were things about him that were distinctly not typical. His clothes, for example; and his shaved head. That he could look the way he looked, and still be on the faculty of a great university, vouched for his brilliance in a way that no stack of diplomachips and awards could have done. Had he not been genuinely a superstar among academics, he would not have been allowed to visit the campus of Massachusetts Multiversity, much less teach in its sedate, tradition-crusted buildings. Jonathan hadn’t had time to read any of the man’s work prior to the meeting, and was sure he wouldn’t have understood it anyway, but the brief biography he’d pulled from the comset’s whozis database was impressive. There were few prestigious mathematics journals in which Professor Macabee Dow had not published, and there were no major awards in his discipline that he had not received except those for which he was ineligible by reason of his youth. But nowhere in the bio had there been even a hint that the man was a flamboy; not even the semantically bleached out word “radical” had appeared there to indicate that this was an eccentric professor in the classical style. Looking at him, Jonathan knew it could only mean that the fellow had tremendous status; nothing else could have kept that information out of the bio. The head was not just shaved, it was stained indigo and waxed to a gleaming fare-thee-well; Jonathan could almost see his reflection in the polished flesh.
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